Looking for a Proxy?

Free proxies are undoubtedly the gateway drug to network attribution, and The Prox Is Right fills a void by providing a robust, diverse, real-time updated, third party catalog of presently active open proxies across all geographies.

The Prox is Right accomplishes this goal by continually searching the Internet for available proxies, and subsequently executing vast tests on the entire catalog with each pass. In each instance, we test multiple protocols (HTTPS, HTTP, SOCKS4, SOCKS5), and based on which types succeed, we conduct further anonymity, user-agent filtering, and Google access tests.

Browser user-agent filtering tests execute looking like a human’s browser (and less like code) and determine if the proxy rejects the request.

Google access tests make requests to Google, and parse the results to determine if Google allowed the request and provided the expected result rather than a captcha or outright block.

Anonymity tests use our own destination servers and inspect all the headers the proxy forwards on, which to varying degrees can expose that a proxy was used, and in many cases the IP address of the initiating request.

While access to the always changing list is designed to be a free service, there are premium plans available for the power user. One paid offering enables unlimited use of the API (as opposed to a 10/day limit), another provides a daily email for life of all presently-active proxies broken down into various formats, and lastly, for the enterprise use-case, one has access to thousands of highly available, low latency, frequently curated and rotated private business-class proxies.

What distinguishes The Prox is Right from other proxy aggregators and checkers is its breadth of access for both humans and machines — and the simple fact that we are not holding anything back. Simply put, The Prox is Right provides a pain-free, real-time updated Internet resource for public consumption.

Looking ahead, the plan is to continue expanding and evolving the service as needs arise. For instance, additional aggregation efforts, expanded tests and the resulting exposed insights on the proxies are all possible avenues of expression.

It’s important to note for some the issues inherent in free proxies (i.e. uptime, reliability, latency, blocking by content/service providers, etc.) make it difficult to conduct extensive web harvesting/scraping, automated data collection, volume scraping or machine-driven collection. In these instances, it makes sense to check out Ntrepid’s Enterprise-class Proxies, where one forgoes the engineering and patience costs required to use open proxies, for a premium fee where proxies really just work as one could best envision.